Gracious Majesty. By Laurence Housman. ,Cape. 8s. 6d.)
MR. HOUSMAN'S preface is disarming, but the impression remains that his Potage a la Reine has suffered a good deal of thinning. It is difficult to define why this criticism persists in mind : the subject is " inexhaustible," as that word is used ; we are not tired of it, and yet one play succeeds in being too like another. The characters change, the voices do not. Mr. Housman tells us too much : sometimes historical facts and amusing ones at that, but the sense of development, implicit in a viewpoint or mysteriously irrational in a mood, is absent. If it is objected that this sense of vistas is too much to demand in so short a play, we can answer Mr. Housman that the series make in effect one long play and this over-simplification, sometimes amounting to the too-easy smile, is deliberate. That extraordinary little play of genius, Echo de Paris, tends to prove that the author believed Wilde to be subtle and therefore handled him subtly, and that, believing the Queen to be obvious-minded, he used his broadest effects in his portrait of her—a fallacy of taste—destroying some of our pleasure in Gracious Majesty.
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